Editorial on Roe

by Editor
April 3, 2013 at 7:58 am

https://www.smartertimes.com/853/editorial-on-roe

A Times editorial about the Supreme Court and gay marriage revisits the arguments over the abortion case Roe v. Wade. Whatever one's view is of the gay marriage cases, the Times account of Roe is a peculiar one. The editorial says:

The real story, as explained by Linda Greenhouse, a former New York Times reporter who now teaches at Yale Law School, and Reva Siegel, a professor there, is that political conflict over abortion was escalating before the Roe decision, and that state progress on decriminalization had reached a standstill in the face of opposition from the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1970, a measure legalizing abortion in New York cleared the State Assembly by just a single vote. Only a veto by the state's Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller, blocked its partial repeal two years later. Had the Supreme Court waited for the states to move, women in a large portion of the country would still be denied the fundamental right to make their own childbearing decisions.

The claim that the court invited a backlash by getting too far ahead of public opinion does not hold. At the time of the ruling, a Gallup poll showed a substantial majority of Americans favored letting the abortion decision be made "solely by a woman and her physician," with more Republicans than Democrats in favor.

Got that? The Times editorial argues simultaneously that " Had the Supreme Court waited for the states to move, women in a large portion of the country would still be denied the fundamental right to make their own childbearing decisions" and that "At the time of the ruling, a Gallup poll showed a substantial majority of Americans favored letting the abortion decision be made "solely by a woman and her physician."

It may be true that in America the government can deny rights favored by substantial majorities of Americans, either through quirks of districting (perhaps the minorities that oppose abortion rights are concentrated in a few states) or of public choice theory (perhaps those who oppose abortion rights are more passionate about that issue, and thus more influential, than those who favor them). But the editorial would be more convincing if it explained that, because otherwise it sounds like it's arguing something somewhat contradictory, which is both that abortion rights had a strong popular majority at the time of the Roe decision and that without the Roe decision Americans would have been deprived of abortion rights for decades to come.

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